Friday, June 19, 2015

Staunton, June 19 – Drawing on
Richard Pipes’ argument that the 1863 Polish revolt was viewed by many Russians
as an illegitimate European attack on Russia and led them to conclude that “only
the autocracy could preserve the integrity of the country,” Irina Glebova
argues that the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014 has had “approximately the
same influence on Russia.”

Paralleling what happened in Poland
150 years ago, the INION historian says, “the attempt of Ukraine to finally
assert its European identity (in opposition to the Soviet-Russian) by completing
the process of building independent statehood and an equal nation offended
Russian national feelings” (ng.ru/ideas/2015-06-19/5_ukraina.html).

The shock of the Ukrainian choice
now, just like that of the Poles in the 19th century, Glebova
argues, “helped promote the final formation in Russia of extreme nationalism
based on anti-Western attitudes and having clearly expressed chauvinist,
xenophobic, and anti-Semitic aspects.” Because it arose as a defensive
reaction, it has been “especially aggressive.”

A
renewed sense of Russian national pride, combined with a belief that Ukraine
had betrayed Russia and that the West was a threat caused “the overwhelming
majority of the Russian population” to support “presidential autocracy” and
converted the ordinary “Great

Russian” into a nationalist,” who completely dispensed
with Soviet-era internationalism.”

This new
Russian nationalist also arose in reaction to “the Gorbachev-Yeltsin past”
which sought to integrate Russia into Europe and to absorb European values,
just as the Russian reaction to the Polish uprising helped trigger reaction to
the liberal reforms Tsar Aleksandr II had carried out before the Poles rose up.

As a
result, Glebova continues, Russian life dispensed with the ideas of freedom,
civic responsibility and social solidarity and turned in just the opposite
direction, thereby restoring the traditional Russian relationship between
rulers and ruled, a relationship that had been threatened by perestroika and
the wild 1990s.

“Typlogically,”
the Moscow historian continues, “the construction of the new Russian social
values [also] recalls the transition from the post-revolutionary 1920s to the
Stalinist USSR.”That parallel suggests
why “in order to kill within itself the 1990s, contemporary Russia requires a ‘Stalin’”
and features of his regime, including acceptance of state violence or terror.

One of
those features is a willingness to engage in war. For most post-Stalin
Russians, Glebova writes, war was an unthinkable horror as a result of their
experiences especially in World War II. But “in 2014, war emerged from the
realm of ideas, images, and possibilities and became a reality: with the help
of the media, war entered into every home.”

War has
begun to define domestic affairs as well, “and the policy of the authorities
and social relations ever more are being defined by the formula: who is not
with us is against us.” This has happened very fast: “over the course of
several months, we have moved along a path which recalls the drift of
post-imperial Russia from February to October 1917.”

As a
result, she says, “an atmosphere was created in the country in which everything
is possible,” including some horrors which many had thought Russian would never
return to but which like the reaction after the 1863 Polish rising may last a
long time before they are ended by a new rising of Russians.